“... accurate assessment, ‘fitful’ at best. Even the outcome has been subject to revision. Goethe may have considered Geoffroy the winner, but others have with equal conviction accorded Cuvier the laurels, seeing his as a victory of sound science over waffly Romanticism. What was the dispute about, and why was it so acrimonious? And why has this episode ...”

“... preoccupations, and sought increasingly to draw links between them. Though some readers may feel that I have been too generous in my use of the personal material – particularly that relating to his feelings about his sexuality and his marriage – my judgment was that it was essential to any interpretation of him as a whole person. Lacey slides ...”

“... Kashmoulah is governor of Mosul’s Nineveh province, appointed by Yawer’s government. (There may be more going on in Iraq than the American military, which says its troops are fighting ‘bad guys’, is aware.) In 1959, as later under Saddam, Mosul provided between a quarter and a third of Iraq’s officer corps and much of its secret service. The ...”

“... the warlords in Kabul are all more or less on the same side, from one ethnic group, the Tajiks. It may not be the worst outcome, but it isn’t good. Basir had inherited a Taliban major-domo. The man had simply stayed on and was comfortably serving his new master. His entrance was one of two interruptions as we sat chatting. The other was Delagha, bringing a ...”

“... self-determination the sole measure of social legitimacy. It is as if, in Carrère’s mind, the May ‘68 slogan, sous les pavés, la plage, has flattened out into the vision of Romand’s null existence, as he drives round the countryside: ‘a vast beach of dead and empty ...”

“... to the flexibilities of our belief in them. But novelists do write to a present, and though there may be nothing of fishwives or moneylenders or hip hop in their pages, the language, the texture, the pattern, the ‘aesthetics’, have everything to do with the social pressure under which the book was written and under which it was initially read. Stendhal is ...”

“... meeting, known as ‘speaker’ and ‘participation’. In one you must listen, in the other you may talk. The form of discourse in participation groups is distinctive. Dialogue (in AA-speak, ‘cross-talk’) is proscribed. You don’t address your fellow alcoholics, you ‘share’. It looks to the outsider like a seminar discussion but isn’t; it’s a ...”

“... and tides, planets and pendulums by celestial law and geometrical order. However surprising it may seem, even the English title, ‘The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy’, was, according to Newton, designed to help the book sell. Long before scientific popularisation became the common salvation of hard-pressed publishers, Newtonianism spawned ...”

“... French scholars featured a banquet of Perfects’ terrine, Montségur cheese and Cathar cake. This may seem as innocuous as the 20th-century British retro-chic Raphael Samuel describes in Theatres of Memory. But search the Internet on Cathars (I looked at only a handful of the 5790 web-pages), and material that would clearly interest historians of modern and ...”

“... stables of the intellect’ – Toulmin’s admiring version of Wittgenstein’s vocation – may be a useful act of philosophical hygiene, but, if you’re consistent in such things, it lacks consequentiality. If, on the other hand, you really believe that philosophical and social scientific Dreams of Rationality and Certainty are disrupting basically ...”

“... to Moscow and back and was the only plane with the proven ability to deliver an atomic bomb. This may well have been decisive in persuading Stalin to back down. It was the world’s first example of nuclear diplomacy – and it worked. More important than Bevin’s amour-propre was a constant worry about American unreliability. ‘The Americans,’ according ...”

“... Scott back in Northampton. This time his movements after discharge cannot be fully traced. But in May 1897 he lay dying, with horrible irony, in Sir Gilbert’s Midland Hotel, St Pancras. Here his children were just in time to see him before he succumbed, of ‘acute cirrhosis of liver and heart disease’. From this unhappy story, Stamp singles out two ...”

“... never asked if their dad might die. Perhaps it never occurred to them that people who fall ill may die. The X-ray is an image that has to be drawn out of ourselves that we might see it in front of our eyes and so take it within ourselves again. Out of the lungs and into the brain. From Phil’s hospital bed we could see the lightbox where the doctors ...”

“... the next generation to rethink the issue. If the experiment goes well, the new House of Lords may come to seem a British analogue to a great French institution: the Council of State. This is an elite assembly of distinguished graduates of the grandes écoles who have earned reputations for sobriety and thoughtfulness as they ascend to the highest ranks of ...”

“... a founder of the US airline business and served as Roosevelt’s air commissioner in the 1930s. He may not have known either that Vidal’s mother, judging from Vidal’s account, resembled one of Williams’s ‘monster women’ – Vidal’s phrase for those figures of self-destruction in Williams’s plays. Nina Gore, the daughter of a blind senator from ...”